The Complete Regency Bestsellers And One Winters Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
them, unwilling to hear the offer. ‘I need only your confidence, Lord Hawkhurst.’ The dog growled at her tone.
‘Then you have it.’ His words were clipped short and he was gone even before she had time to answer. As the door shut behind him, Aurelia closed her eyes. He had looked at her as if she were…unknown, the undercurrents between them disappearing into simple loathing. The ache of it stabbed quick for in the nights after everyone had found their beds and the moon was high she had dreamed there might be something finer, something real and right and true. As she shook her head hard, the betrayal of hope was a timely reminder of why she had not sought out the company of others in the years since Charles’s accident.
The shaped sharp end of the oak branch had pointed upwards, all the intentions of death in its careful placement. The brush before the jump had been so precisely angled, hiding everything, and she had been most vigilant in shielding John from the heavy hand of the law when it was determined he was the last person to be seen in the vicinity. The questions had come, of course, but the true answers had been lost in the interim, clues to the truth gone for ever and only conjecture left.
Sitting at the table, she unlocked a drawer at the very bottom of her desk and drew out a pouch of leather wrapped in silk. She knew that Lord Hawkhurst had not been here for a casual or idle chat; she had seen it in his stance and heard it in all the things he had not said.
‘Ahh, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que je fais maintenant?’
Oh, my God, what should I do now?
Drawing out the newest missive from Paris, Aurelia understood the need to be even more careful than she usually was when she passed the letter on.
She remembered Sylvienne’s wide and frightened eyes when they had last met in Paris, the furtive looks across her shoulder as her mother had explained she did not feel safe.
Freddy Delsarte had been there, of course, his own brand of cunning gleaming in his eyes, the secrets of the daughter of a well-respected and wealthy English gentleman pointing to a lucrative blackmail.
Another responsibility. A further problem. Aurelia felt as though she was a tightrope walker poised on a thin rope above chaos and despair.
Aurelia met Stephen Hawkhurst in the library in Bond Street on Tuesday morning, almost falling over him as she rounded one aisle. His height and strength in the smallness of Hookham’s seemed out of place here, a warrior amidst the formality of Society’s quieter pursuits.
She wished she had worn her light blue dress, as even to her own uncritical eye the black bombazine did her skin little favour. Pushing such ridiculous vanity aside, she waited, for after their conversation at Park Street there could be little he wanted to say to her ever again.
‘I hope your father’s influenza is abating, Mrs St Harlow.’
So that was how he would play it. She felt her cheeks flush red. ‘Indeed it is, my lord.’ Her hands clutched a book of flowers drawn as lithographs on to thin tissue and further afield she noticed a couple of women looking their way.
Nay, his way, she amended, their expressions having the same sort of interest she had perceived on most of the female guests at his ball.
When he beckoned her to follow him towards the end of the room she went uncertainly, pleased that the onlookers were blocked from her view by a tall shelf.
‘I have been giving the…situation with your father some thought.’
Shaking her head, she turned to leave, but he caught her arm and held it, the grip of his fingers allowing her to go nowhere.
‘Could you speak with your cousin and gain his approval in ensuring your family’s living situation is more stable? Surely if such a thing were to leave you destitute the man might consider such an action.’
‘Or he might throw us out tomorrow.’
‘He seems reasonable enough.’
‘You have checked up on him?’ Horror and anger made her voice rise a good few octaves.
‘Mr James Beauchamp has a name for being a fair and equitable man.’
‘No.’
‘He is also a friend of Rodney Northrup’s.’
‘One can be a respected man or a beloved friend and still have a penchant for that which has never been enjoyed.’
‘From where I stand there seems more than enough to share and I am certain your family would be relieved to see you at home a little more often.’
‘No.’ The single word was louder this time as she broke off contact between them, danger sprouting from such intransigence. Did Lord Stephen Hawkhurst really expect just to waltz into her life and change it as if it were a knitting pattern, easy and simple? She knew what would happen next. Of course she did. If Mr James Beauchamp came to the house in the guise of a distant cousin inclined to help, everything would change.
They would all have to be grateful to him and the whims of an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old man might include the wish for a wife. Then Leonora or Prudence or Harriet would be sacrificed for the greater good of the family, and each of them would go without a whimper to protect her. She knew this as truly as she knew the night followed the day because all year the whispers she heard when the others thought she was not listening had been about their worries for her.
Aurelia works too hard. If only we could find a way to help her.
Well, the silks were beginning to pay and the new completed designs were beautiful and different. Another few months and everything would be possible. the only tripping block stood before her in Hookham’s lending library in the large form of the implacable Lord Stephen Hawkhurst and he did not look pleased.
‘How many other sisters do you have?’
‘Two. Prudence and Harriet are twins.’
‘Do they look like you?’
‘No. They are much prettier, for they favour Leonora and—’
A ripe swear word broke off her sentence.
‘Charles was a man who appreciated beauty in women. Surely he let you know of the qualities in yourself that he admired?’
‘Oh, indeed he did.’ She took away the sting in the words by sheer dint of will. He admired women who would do things in the bedroom that even prostitutes in the East End of London might have blushed at and he had simply abandoned her on his estate in the far north when she had refused to take part in any of it. Even the servants he had left her with had been instructed to be of as little help as possible until she came around to understanding what the words ‘I promise to obey’ meant in their hastily completed marriage.
The first few nights alone had been the worst. After that she had thanked the Lord for the distance between her new abode and her new husband and for the independence that naturally followed. Aye, her freedoms had been hard won and she was not about to give them up now to anyone.
‘Such problems are mine to solve, my lord.’ Aurelia could barely get the words out, so desperate was she to escape, and the headache she had had all morning began to play upon her vision. ‘The silk trade is shaping up well and in a few months I am certain I shall be—’
‘Dead and buried by the looks of the dark rings beneath your eyes.’
Glancing down, she resisted the urge to lift her fingers to her face. She had hardly slept for days, the difficulty of everything increased somehow by all the consequences of the Hawkhurst ball. Leonora and Rodney. Cassandra Lindsay and her invitation to a country-house party. The carriage ride home where she had understood for the first time in her life what it was to be attracted to a man.
Not